Subterranean Homesick Blues
by Serious Black
Summary: [Post OotP, Harry POV] With apologies to Bob Dylan. Harry's reached the Bargaining stage of grief, but what he sees is what he'll never get.


SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES  
  
by Serious Black  
  
I had a million things to tell you before you went.   
  
I wanted to say all kinds of stuff, I wanted to thank you. I had questions about my grandparents and my dad's family.The night it happened, where would you have taken me? Also I have all this money in Gringotts, and if...something happened to me I'd want to make sure it went to. Well. But I don't know how to make a, a will or anything.   
  
See, there were all these hard questions only you could answer.   
  
I wanted-I want the kind of life where I could ask those questions. Ask the person I live with, someone who knows me. I wanted that before I knew I was allowed to want things. I hid the idea of you under my pillow for years. It was a little warm thread through my chest at night. My secret Someday. As far back as I can remember, there was this plan I was making in my sleep. The plan made it okay to wake up.  
  
My best ideas, the pictures that came out clearest, I always saw those in my dreams. Mostly there was just never time during the day. I was busy with Ron and Hermione, busy not getting caught, working out how to stay alive here and now.   
  
Then there were other dreams to worry about and I was busy running myself down the hallway, trying to get through that door-I was positive, I was so sure our future was on the other side. Our right future. Sirius, I couldn't see it was the middle of the maze all over again.  
  
But it wasn't always like that. I used to trust my dreams and need my dreams. You have to know-you must have seen it yourself, the way things were supposed to be. How we could live. The place we'd go together, you and me, when our names belonged to us, when we could face the world square and never through bars, just dogs starving ourselves to slip through. I saw it when I was a little kid locked up with a camp cot for a bed. I can see it now.   
  
It happens like this:  
  
I come to you on a bus. It has to be a bus, the Muggle kind, because that was the plan before wizards. The bus drops me on the road at the bottom of the hill where you live, a high hill with tall grass and a winding gravel drive, someplace in the country I've never seen. I leave my trunk down there for now, it's okay. Nobody steals here.  
  
The flowers along the drive are tall, blue and gold, curling white on vines, Neville would know the names of every one and every one is wild---nothing grown in boxes on sills from seed-packets, not out here. I follow the smell of them up to the top, where the drive opens onto sky and there's nothing walling you in on any side.   
  
It's different up here. The evening air is different, clear like on top of the Astronomy Tower, moving over the grass in ripples. Behind the house there'll be lime trees ringed round the border of clean-mown lawn, four counties rolling out below the racket of a million crickets. But in front there's nothing except that sea of soft green waves and you on the porch above, now coming down the steps, now crossing the pebble walk, now running, shirt like a sail as you catch me up, arms open and door open and lamplight gold in every open window of our home.   
  
Your hand is on my face. I look at the house. I love the lowness of it, the clean pale wood. I see a porch swing and a little table with a beer bottle on top. There's a red flower in the bottle. You've hung windchimes.  
  
Let's go in, Harry, you say, and Are you hungry? I tell you that I'm starving. You open the screen door and we're inside, finally, safe inside, where there's no carpet, no ugly bric-a-brac, no portraits watching from the walls, no mirrors to slink past or hide from or smash.   
  
There are no curtains on the windows. A lot of things will change in the house over the years, but that never will. Where we live the air is free and high, always moving through the house in currents and drafts, sweeping away, clearing out. On the day I leave the house I will look back and see you smiling in a window. You'll breathe in the promise of good luck on that clear wind, no trace of any veil to keep the sunlight or the future out. 


End file.
